Last Thursday I took a break from retirement to address a
small but inspiring gathering of innovators at the Civil Infrastructure
Showcase hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
These are people who think about distinctly unglamorous things that are not
usually associated with innovation. Like filling potholes or watching bridges
rust.

Unglamorous, but really important. You can't have missed
coverage of the disastrous bridge failure in Minneapolis in 2007 that killed 13
people and injured over a hundred more, but headlines like that are just the
lowlights of a bad situation. Roadbed deterioration — things like potholes —
cost U.S. motorists an estimated $67 billion
a year in car repairs and costs. California’s farmers are suffering a
disastrous drought, but nationwide we lose about 6 billion gallons of clean
water a day to leaky pipelines. These
are failures of infrastructure maintenance.

The hard-pressed municipal, county and state transportation
agencies face many challenges, not the least of which is constrained budgets.
They absolutely need to prioritize repair work, but how do you best do that?
The most recent U.S. Department of Transportation figures show well over 28,000
“structurally deficient” bridges currently in use.

Several of the 12 research groups that gathered
at NIST last week have some ideas about that. How about small instrument
packages that can be mounted around questionable bridges to monitor strain and
other key values and report back wirelessly to a data monitoring system? Rural
bridges usually don’t have wall outlets, so engineers from Mistras Group,
Virginia Polytechnic, and the Universities of South Carolina and Miami sweated
to get power requirements down to where the boards could be run by little
bridge-mounted windmills—which they also developed.